The family at the heart of The Twilight Saga touched down in San Diego at Comic-Con for the final time. The Cullens, aka Peter Facinelli, Kellan Lutz, Ashley Greene, Jackson Rathbone, Nikki Reed and the matriarch Elizabeth Reaser, are here talking about their emotions concerning the final chapter of the Stephenie Meyer series, Breaking Dawn Part 2.
One thing that immediately impresses is Facinelli is quite the joker. When the clan is reminiscing about the first film, the actor who plays the patriarch of the Cullens is shocked at his co-stars’ accommodations versus his when the series first started.
“You had hotels? I had to stay in a tent,” he said as everyone laughed.
Facinelli can turn reminiscent quickly as he recalled the first time the Twilight family met.
“I remember we had a lot of rehearsals in the original Twilight to learn each other, to kind of experience each other so we could all be like a family. So we spent a lot of time together,” Facinelli said. What bonded them was also something that would, onscreen once they were on the Vancouver set, center around an iconic scene in that first film.
“I remember going to that indoor warehouse thing and we played baseball. That was so much fun. They gave us sneakers. We got to play indoor baseball.”
The Cullen family showed its cinematic unity with that scene in Twilight, and the glue that holds them together has only increased since Kristen Stewart as Bella became a part of the family in Breaking Dawn Part 1 and is now a vampire -- as seen in the Breaking Dawn Part 2 trailer. Lutz has been ready for this chapter since reading it in Stephenie Meyer’s bestselling book. It seems that Bella and Emmett have a "guess who's stronger" contest.
“I’ve been looking forward to shooting that scene since day one. I read all the books and was like, ‘Hopefully we get to make Breaking Dawn because you finally get to see a scene with Emmett and Bella. Then to see and work with Kristen who is a brilliant actress and see her transform from human Bella to vampiric Bella, it was fun. I’m really looking forward to seeing that scene in the movie and I know the fans will also,” Lutz said.
"I know that Emmett doesn’t have the most lines but he’s such an influential character," he said, laughing. "I just love playing him. It’s just great showing the protective sides and how much he loves being a vampire and how much he is rooting for Bella to become one so he can roughhouse with her until she kicks his butt and that’s no fun for him."
When Reaser arrived on set, she admitted the entire cast and crew had no inclination that they were on the verge of creating a pop culture lightning bolt. “We had no idea what we were doing, what we were getting into. We thought we were doing this little vampire movie in Portland,” Reaser said. “There was a lot of silliness, a lot of hijinx and bad behavior.”
Cast chemistry is what Rathbone believes has everything to do with how the series became so successful. “The first one was everybody coming together, getting together for the first time and doing those epically long Cullen family shoots. Whenever there’s a scene with the Cullen family, those scenes take two days to do,” Rathbone said.
The rest was history.
Reed credits Twilight director Catherine Hardwicke, the woman who cast the film and first had the arduous task of bringing a beloved book to life.
“I think that one of the skills of that job is being able to walk into an empty room and have that kind of vision and fill it up and see things that aren’t there and have that imagination,” Reed said. “I feel like a lot of directors I’ve worked with, not on this saga but just in general, don’t have that. She took all of us and cast us based on who we were, not how we looked, which is why we’re all sitting here.”
When the series ended, Greene had to have something to remember a large and influential period in her life. “I took my Alice Cullen necklace with me, the original one, which is pretty cool to have,” Greene said.
She, almost more than the rest of the clan, was too thrilled to be talking Twilight at Comic-Con for the final time and proud of where they came from and have gone. “This is the first event that is kind of marking the beginning of the end of Twilight. It’s the last Comic-Con we’re going to come to for Twilight, so I guess it’s kind of sinking in,” Greene added.
“Luckily we have it captured on film forever and I think our fans are really incredible and they seem to be following us into new projects that we’re doing and really supporting us, so that’s pretty neat.”
Before the chat with the cinematic Cullen clan ends, Lutz still wants everyone to know that Bella is not stronger than him. “Emmett’s a great actor, that’s why he let her win,” he said, and everyone laughed.
“I’m three times the size of Kristen!”